"Citation analysis is not new. The technique was first identified
by Garfield and has since been exploited in information products from
ISI, the company that Garfield formed. Garfield's brilliant insight
was to recognize that references in journal papers can be used to form
an intellectual index across the whole of a chosen literature. Such
an index would be impossibly complex and costly to compile without author
references: 'by using authors' references in compiling the citation
index, we are in reality utilizing an army of indexers' (Garfield 1955)."
(Hitchcock, et al. 2002)

The Web of Knowledge is a commercial citation database service owned
by ISI offering access to forward and backward linked citations derived
from approximately 8,000 professional and academic journals. This discussion
explores an intellectual web created by following citations in Web of
Knowledge on the topic of open citation linking.

Having done some work with Open Archive Initiative (OAI) archives and
its access protocol, OAI-MHP, I hope this assignment will let me discover
the historic roots and current research topics and papers on open citation
linking: projects like OpCit and Cern's DocumentServer (Claivaz, 2001).
Just as Linux may force Microsoft to lower its prices, might open citations
offer a free alternative to commercial citation databases? (Galli, 2003)
More generally, is open access a good thing for libraries and librarians?
An upcoming article in "College & Research Libraries News"
by Peter Suber argues just that. (Suber, 2003)

To see if Web of Knowledge can shed some light on these questions, proceed
to the search.